no more waste, just resource

On Friday 2^nd of December I had the pleasure of speaking at the Chartered Institute of Waste Management (CIWM) Towards Zero Waste (TZW) Conference in Cardiff.

My presentation focused on the idea of waste as a social crime and proposed that everyone needs to take responsibility and show leadership to significantly accelerate the rate of required behavioural change. I put forward the case that we should move away immediately from using the term waste and instead view everything as resource. I also suggested we need to ‘use’ instead of ‘consume’ resource and transform rather than destroy. I reminded everyone that we should not use the excuse of ‘that’s the way it is’.

I presented 3 case studies; our work with Harman International on ecodesigning car speakers which emphasised the importance of material selection and true system impacts and costing; our ongoing work with Orangebox on ecodesigning office furniture which emphasised the importance of being transparent and viewing all materials as resource; and an example from the John Lewis Partnership of a unimaginably over-packaged shoe rack, imported from China, that did not assemble, which was delivered to my home the previous week. I brought the packaging with me to maximise the impact and will write a separate post on this, as I also want to contact John Lewis to get their side of the story.

I really enjoyed the day, with its mix of talks, workshops and exhibition, and as I always find with these type of events I met some really inspiring, knowledgeable and committed people. Thankfully the theme of ‘no more waste only resource’ carried through the day, and became a key outcome of the conference.

I ended with the following quote from Thich Nhat Hanh to emphasise our interconnectedness.

“To be” is inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing.